A well-written digression, but a digression none the less

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	• Divisadero Michael Ondaatje Knopf, 2007 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 70 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

To Gaze From a Distance

It's an outstanding book; this Divisadero. For the characters in this book and particularly Anna it is what was stated within; "I look into the distance for those I have lost, so that I see them everywhere." The impact on lives of a violent punctuation point is clear. The book becomes a bit "kaleidoscopic" in the back 1/3rd, but then again that is the point. Lives touched by loss never are quite the same and Ondaatje does a masterful job with the language to capture that sentiment. Bravo!

A well-written digression, but a digression none the less

I was planning to lambaste this book unmercifully for its seemingly inexcusable digression in the middle of the book, where it wanders away from its three main characters and becomes fixated on Lucien Segura, a French writer of an earlier era who seems only tangentially connected to the main narrative thread. But then at the very end I understood his significance as a parallel character to the father of the three main characters that form the focus of the book's beginning sections.

Nevertheless, this understanding only partly excuses the self-indulgent digression evident in this novel, which I feel would have been much stronger had Ondaatje stayed with the characters who dominate its opening pages. By comparison, the Segura section, for all its lyrical beauty, lacks the compelling power of the earlier sections. Why did Ondaatje betray the reader in this insouciant fashion? Had he run out of ideas for his main characters? His choice -- to abandon these characters in mid-narrative -- seems perverse and inexplicable. This novel is by no means a success.

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Losing the thread

While I loved some of the writing here--Ondaatje really can evoke powerful images or emotions with just a phrase--I was disappointed with the book by the end. Frankly, the Coop/Claire/Ana storylines and how they weave together is just much more compelling than the French author and the gypsies and all that. It seemed like a different book. Actually, it seemed like the beginning of perhaps a trilogy, but still, Ondaatje builds the Coop and Claire stuff as if it's going to reach a conclusion, then pulls away only to return briefly at the end. I felt like Ondaatje lost the thread of what the novel was about, or got too caught up in the other stories and could not tie them all together satisfactorily.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, page 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14

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